


swelter

by heartstringtheory



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Curses, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-13 21:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17496095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartstringtheory/pseuds/heartstringtheory
Summary: Lee Seokmin is cursed, maybe.Probably.





	swelter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [habitualwords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/habitualwords/gifts).
  * Inspired by [so maybe, baby, please](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10855476) by [habitualwords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/habitualwords/pseuds/habitualwords). 



> hi !! i intended to write you seokhao but something about this seokhui stuck in my head and then this fell out T-T . . . i hope you like it . . . i wanted to write more but i ran out of time - it was a delight to write for you though :-) !
> 
> i think i have a fairly broad interpretation of what counts as a remix - i essentially took the basic premise of so maybe (seokmin wanting really badly to kiss junhui) and ran with it
> 
> enjoy (hopefully) !! love u hehe

 

 

Seokmin rolls onto his back.

The music loops and starts over for a few seconds before Soonyoung finally manages to turn it off. Seokmin’s skin is tacky, hardwood floor cold through the flimsy fabric of his shirt. He stares down the ceiling, then looks at Junhui. He can’t help it.

Junhui’s profile is a thing that has to be digested in terms of negative space and geometry, prismatic. Seokmin’s eyes follow the line from Junhui’s forehead to his nose, mouth, chin, throat, chest, blinking sweat out of his eyes before he can let them wander any further south. Even during the dead of winter, the practice room is a pressure cooker that concentrates both the heat and Seokmin’s most errant trains of thought into white hot clusters of ache and incessant longing.

The problem at hand is: Seokmin keeps thinking about kissing Junhui. Occasionally, a whole lot more than that, where ‘think’ is a liberal use of the term. What Seokmin really does is fantasize, day dream, put himself in a kind of trance. Junhui turns his head to Seokmin, catches him looking.

It’s surprisingly easy; the sitting up, scooting over, leaning in—

  
  


“Of course I’ve thought about kissing Junhui,” says Soonyoung, matter of fact. “I knew him when I was, well, a teenager.” Finishing the sentence makes Soonyoung’s ears turn blotchy red and pink, beet stained. “Although, I never lost _sleep_ about it.” He scratches his neck. “Maybe you’re cursed!”

Right, Seokmin thinks flatly. Junhui pads quietly past the open doorway, and Seokmin stiffens, eyes glued to the shadowy shape of his back as it retreats, solid and—not the point. He wrinkles his nose, but it just aches slightly from the collision course it completed with Junhui’s in the practice room half an hour earlier. Soonyoung waggles his eyebrows, catching him in the act. Seokmin makes a face.

Soonyoung’s totally useless. Very funny. _Cursed._

  
  
  


“I brought you some ice…” says Junhui, rubbing anxiously at the side of his neck with one hand, offering the towel encased ice with the other. His head tilts, smile uneven.

Seokmin wants to burn into dust and die, blow away in the perpetual draft that plagues all the bedrooms in their dorm. He looks at the floor, then accepts the offering, gingerly pressing the ice against the ache. “Thanks, Jun-hyung.” His voice comes out muffled and nasally, blocked by the towel. “Is your face—uhm—okay...?”

Junhui touches the pad of his index finger to the tip of his nose. “Yeah! It stopped hurting a while ago. If I’m lucky, it probably won’t even bruise!”

  
  
  
  


In terms of relative inconvenience, Seokmin’s not-curse isn’t all that bad. The group is recuperating in the off season, so there’s no camera’s to embarrass himself in front of, and when traveling, the vans tend to get divided up between units, so he can’t be tempted jump Junhui in the wide bench seat that constitutes the third row. It’s not destroying his life, per say, but it is tearing up his psyche in increasingly creative ways.

Presently, Seokmin is sitting in the kitchen with Minghao, still reeling from the nonsense dream he woke up from this morning. It’s fading already, Seokmin knows, but Junhui was there, adorned in a very holey sweater, like it’d been knit by an amatuer that just couldn't keep the knots together. He suspects the dream didn’t have much to do with predicting the future’s fashion trends, considering the burning sweat he woke up in, manifesting like a low grade fever.

Minghao waves a hand in front of his face. “You okay?” he asks, smiling sideways. “I asked if you wanted to split the leftovers from yesterday.”

Seokmin blinks. “Yes!” he blurts. “I mean—yeah. Sorry!”

Minghao laughs lightly and shrugs, heading for the fridge. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Did you not get any sleep or something?”

“I, uh…” starts Seokmin. “No, I definitely slept.”

Minghao squints at him over his shoulder, holding the plastic tin, and snorts. “Okay,” he says, dry, and then his line of vision flicks up over Seokmin’s head. “Oh, Jun-hyung, are you hungry? I’m heating up leftovers from dinner yesterday.”

Junhui yawns, then drapes his arms over Seokmin’s shoulders from behind, setting his chin atop the crown of his head. “Yes, please,” he chimes, dropping his weight more heavily. His hand pats Seokmin’s sternum as he yawns again. “Morning, Seokminnie.”

Seokmin makes an attempt at relaxation, easing back against Junhui’s chest. “Morning,” he squeaks.

Minghao continues fiddling with the hot plate settings, oblivious. Junhui slides off Seokmin and into the chair beside him, resting his cheek on Seokmin’s shoulder, sagging like a thing defeated. His eyes slip closed.

“Woke up tired?” asks Minghao absently, stirring the remainder of the spicy tofu stew in a pot that’s much too large for the amount they had leftover. The dorm is fairly short on cookware variety.

Junhui nods, turning to further squash his face against Seokmin’s shoulder, breath tickling at Seokmin’s collar. “Couldn’t stay asleep,” he whines. “It was like—what’s the phrase—tossing and turning all night.”

Soonyoung wanders into the kitchen, bedhead plastering his part in a zig-zag like a river valley, and steals the spoon from Minghao to take a flaming hot taste of the soup, straight from the pot on the stove. “I slept great,” he say cheerily.

Junhui groans in complaint. Minghao snatches the silverware back, shooing Soonyoung away towards the table.

“What’s his problem?” Soonyoung asks, nodding towards Junhui.

“Couldn’t sleep,” supplies Minghao, filling ceramic bowls with bright red broth and tofu, sliding them down the table. Steam rises in lazy coils, heady.  “Now he’s being fussy.”

“I’m not being fussy,” Junhui says sagely, straightening up in his seat, stoicism as mockery. Seokmin’s shoulder goes cold in the absence of Junhui, frostbite so icy that it loops around and turns back into heat.

Soonyoung tilts his head from one side to the other,  talking around the spoon in his mouth. “Isn’t there an old wives tale about how if you can’t seem to sleep, you must be awake in someone else’s dream?”

  
  
  


“Seokmin-ah,” Junhui whispers.

Seokmin turns over, blinking Junhui’s face into clarity, yellow light illuminating his silhouette as he peers down at Seokmin over the back of the couch. Seokmin, still slightly incoherent, grumbles.

“You slept through dinner,” Junhui says, marginally louder than before. Seokmin had been catching up on the sleep he lost to mirage-like visions of Junhui, opting for the couch and his headphones over the fresh, bed-bound memory of his dream. Waking up to Junhui’s face again feels like a very specific kind of hell. Junhui fiddles with his own earrings. “I was craving hotpot anyway...did you want to maybe come with me?”

“Uhm,” says Seokmin, because somehow saying _yes_ has turned into an insurmountable tongue twister. He nods, sitting up. “I’m not paying!”

Junhui grins. “That’s okay. Those who pay get to be in charge of the spice level anyway!” He tosses a winter coat at Seokmin, the nylon fabric of his own swishing, and busies himself with wrapping a wide scarf around his neck. Seokmin pulls his mittens out from the pocket of his coat, trailing Junhui to the door.

“Hyung” he says, sickly sweet, “go easy on me.”

Junhui’s smile sprawls further, eyes flashing above the hemmed edge of his scarf and zipped up winter coat. “Bring a hat,” he says, waiting outside in the dim, empty hallway. For a second, Seokmin is slammed with the feeling that Junhui is going to start pulling him out the door by the lapels of his coat, or at least his own desire for him to. “I think it’s going to snow.”

  


 

 

Minghao raises an eyebrow. “You _what?”_

Seokmin hides his face in his hands, resigned to his fate. “I tried to kiss Jun.”

“Like, right now?”

Seokmin falls face down into his bed, smothering himself. The heat the memory makes him flush with is unbearable, like he’s been locked in a sauna, or trapped in a steamer.  He shakes his head. “Yesterday.”

Minghao sits gingerly near the headboard, patting Seokmin’s back. “Where? Why? What did he do?”

Seokmin rolls over, grinning morbidly. “Subway line two?” he replies, sheepish. Minghao gives him a dead-eyed look. “After we got hotpot together. Well—I didn’t _try_ to kiss him, it’s just—the inner circle line was really crowded and we were standing really close together, so I got stuck thinking that if I just leaned forward a little bit, I could just…”

“Okay. So?”

Seokmin grumbles, exasperated. “I can’t hide anything! Everything I think plays out on my face in crystal clear HD! He has to know, right? Myungho, I’m totally screwed. I don’t know what came over me, I think I’m cursed—”

Minghao laughs, flopping down on the bed next to him to stare up at the ceiling in solidarity. “Cursed? Who fed you that line?”

Seokmin crosses his arms, saving face. “Soonyoung…”

Minghao laughs harder. “The only curse you have is  gullibility, Seokmin-ah.” He leans up on one elbow, expression turning quizzical. “Hey, do you feel alright? You’re getting really warm.”

  
  
  


 

“Mingyu said that Myungho said you came down with a fever,” says Junhui, hanging off the doorway like a curtain.

Seokmin shrugs noncommittally, doing an impression of a turtle as he sinks into the blankets, heart kicking along like a snare drum. He told Minghao to keep his mouth shut, but forgot to consider that he might as well share a brain with Mingyu. Where there’s one, there’s two.

Junhui steps inside Seokmin’s room. “I guess I should have made you wear more clothes, huh...it _was_ really cold…”

Seokmin opens his mouth, then closes it. “It’s probably just a forty-eight hour thing,” he lies. At best, this feeling has been haunting him for far more than a week. Seokmin’s still sweating it out, waiting for relief.

“Hm,” muses Junhui. He looks around the room dramatically, hands on his hips. “Aren’t you bored in here like this?” He picks up a stray shirt, then drops it, like he was expecting to find something of greater interest underneath. “Want me to show you how to play Arena of Valor? I bet that’ll eat up your whole day, don’t you?”

“Sure,” replies Seokmin, because he can’t seem to stop subjecting himself to the wellspring of his own suffering, inviting Junhui to camp out in his single bedroom. Junhui sits down on the edge of the bed, placing a palm down on the mattress above Seokmin’s shoulder, leaning over.

“You’re not sick,” observes Junhui, saccharine, peeling the bedsheets down to reveal Seokmin’s eyes, the flush creeping up his cheekbones and curling around the tips of his ears.

Seokmin pulls the sheet back over his head, defiant. “Lovesick,” he amends, voice strangled, the obstruction the size and color of his big old bleeding heart.

Junhui laughs, bright, like the sound could punch sunlight through the minimum thread count gaps in his sheets. “Lovesick!” he repeats, amused. Seokmin shoves at him blindly, whining, wishing he could peel out of his red hot skin, or disappear from the sheer force and concentration of his embarrassment, sure it could open up some kind of black hole in the universe. Seokmin peeks out from the blankets. Junhui’s hair, slightly grown out, falls around his face in brown-black locks. He fusses with the collar of Seokmin’s shirt, then fixes him with a look so steady that Seokmin feels like up until this moment he’d been pitched from a boat. “How long does that usually last?”

Seokmin’s frazzled silence only spurs Junhui on further. Maybe Soonyoung was on to something. Junhui is beautiful, and Seokmin can see how this is about to get ugly.

Junhui stands up, pushing a hand back through Seokmin’s bangs, slightly damp and clammy. His eyes flicker across Seokmin’s face, seemingly gauging the situation.

Seokmin’s pretty sure if Junhui kisses him for real, he’d die, or explode, or get transmuted into the sixth dimension—something catastrophic of that sort. He supposes he never thought past the thick fog of desire, and now that he’s confronted with the reality of the thing, his brain has gone full fish-out-of-water. Besides, the whole point of a curse is never getting what you want, right?

Junhui leans down and plants a chaste kiss to the sizzling surface of Seokmin’s left temple, laughing quietly through his nose. “Stay right here,” he says simply, bobcat grin. “Let me bring you some ice.”

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> leave me a comment or come find me on twt @hochitown or @hoshiologyPhD !!


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